20 Point Checklist for Vetting a Managed Hosting Provider

20 Point Checklist for Vetting

a Managed Hosting Provider



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20 Point Checklist for Vetting

Your Hosting Provider

The effective use of technology to optimize and grow your business is

quickly separating the winners from the losers. If you¡¯re a small or

medium sized business, you¡¯re probably feeling this competitive pressure

in a variety of different ways. You may ?nd it hard to keep up with the

pace of innovation and feel like larger competitors are leaving you

behind. You may also ?nd it hard to hire and retain the type of top

technical talent required to keep your systems running smoothly. And if

you¡¯re in a highly regulated market that must adhere to compliance

standards like HIPAA and PCI, these challenges are only exacerbated.

Rely on Trusted Expertise

Many small- and medium-sized businesses have discovered the bene?ts

of outsourcing the management of their key IT infrastructure (i.e. servers,

network, etc.) to a managed hosting provider. Managed hosting

providers can deliver the deep and specialized technical expertise

required to keep mission critical workloads running smoothly. They also

offer other bene?ts, like the ability to shift IT investments from costly upfront CAPEX to more manageable and recurring OPEX. Perhaps their

biggest bene?t is their ability to relieve the pressures identi?ed above

and help your business stayed focused on driving innovation that

delivers meaningful bene?ts to your customers.

As you pursue a managed hosting strategy, it¡¯s important to remember

that not all providers are equal. Some claim to offer the infrastructure

and technical skills, such as certifications from Microsoft and other

vendors, to support your objectives, but don¡¯t. Others have the resources,

but choose to focus them on certain types or sizes of companies that

don¡¯t re?ect where you are as a business. If you¡¯re not careful, you might

end up with the wrong managed hosting provider for your needs.

Asking the Right Questions

The key to ensuring that you choose the right managed hosting

provider is to make sure that you are asking the right questions up front,

before you sign a contract. In order to help you do that, we¡¯ve put

together this comprehensive checklist to help you get started. It¡¯s

organized into three sections that each cover an important aspect of

managed hosting. Since every business is unique, we encourage you to

use this checklist as a starting point to help make sure that you answer

all the important questions speci?c to your business and its needs.





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PART

ONE

NETWORKS AND SERVERS

All infrastructure is not created equal. If you¡¯re satis?ed with the

performance you¡¯re getting from your hosting provider, you may assume

that the speed and power you experience are standard across the

industry. On the other hand, if you¡¯ve been burned before ¨C partnered

with a provider who just couldn¡¯t deliver the performance you needed ¨C

you¡¯ll know exactly why you should care about networks and servers.

The variations in network and server performance between different

providers, and especially between service offerings like unmanaged,

shared hosting, or fully managed hosting, is vast and impacted by many

factors. Is the provider you¡¯re dealing with a host, or a reseller

piggybacking on the service of another company? Where are their data

centers located? What hosting platform do they use? What hardware?

A Strong Foundation

All the features you should expect from a quality managed hosting

provider ¨C regularly upgraded hardware, planned failovers during

scheduled maintenance or upgrades to reduce downtime, and scalability

to handle increased traf?c ¨C are services that can disappear in an instant

when you switch to a lower quality provider, and bring the performance of

all your workloads to a grinding halt in the process.

Now it¡¯s fairly likely that you¡¯ll never lay eyes on your hosting provider¡¯s

data center. And frankly, if you did, it wouldn¡¯t help you determine

anything about their services. So whether you¡¯re shopping for a new

provider or proactively checking that the services you¡¯re paying for are

meeting your needs, it¡¯s important to ask the right questions.



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PART ONE | Network and Servers

CAN YOUR HOSTING PROVIDER:

1.

Provide a fully redundant network and power infrastructure

to deliver reliability and peak performance?

2.

Offer dedicated and cloud servers to ensure your workload

performance isn¡¯t affected by other customers?

3.

Have the expertise to prevent network problems and

immediately address any issues that arise?

4.

Have data centers in optimal geographic locations to

serve your end users, wherever they may be?

5.

Offer a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure that all of

your customers have a remarkable experience?

6.

Provide you with optimized server templates that

uniquely address the needs of your workloads?

7.

Let you schedule resizes, reboots and upgrades to

minimize the impact on your customers?

Provide a fully redundant network and power

infrastructure to ensure peak performance?



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PART

TWO

APPLICATIONS AND SITES

The difference between working with a managed hosting provider and a

self-managed hosting provider can make all the difference to the

reliability, security, and performance of your applications and sites.

Self-managed hosting providers excel at deploying and repairing

infrastructure, but lack the critical expertise to help you optimize that

infrastructure to meet the unique needs of your workloads. They also lack

the expertise to help identify and prevent issues before they impact your

business.

Don¡¯t Be Fooled by Imitators.

To complicate matters further, many self-managed hosting providers

attempt to pass themselves off as managed hosting providers. They may,

for example, offer incomplete packages of advanced services a la carte for

an additional cost. What¡¯s worse, these services often operate in

independent silos managed by separate teams that don¡¯t communicate

well with each other and with your team, making root cause analysis and

remediation a nightmare.

Don¡¯t Settle for Second Best.

If you¡¯re not currently working with a managed hosting provider, it will

almost certainly shock you to see what you¡¯re missing out on. All too often

the success of your workloads relies on a tight collaboration between your

in-house development team and those responsible for managing the

underlying infrastructure. Seasoned managed hosting providers excel at

this type of collaboration, delivering key insights and recommendations

that can make all the difference to you and your business.

So as you evaluate those claiming to provide managed hosting services,

make sure to explore the depth and breadth of their application support

by leveraging the following checklist of questions. In that way you¡¯ll

ensure that you¡¯ll actually get what you need to succeed.



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